Admittedly, the child’s well-being was something that I should have thought of before that moment, but my brain had been far too crowded with the bloodlust. The need for vengeance I’d felt after ridding the world of those pieces of shit—ones thathad absolutely no issue preying on the weak, even children—hit me hard right to that very moment.
The boy couldn’t be more than six—if that.
After entering the carriage and covering the boy in heavy wool blankets as he was laid out on the bench opposite of us, Niz enacted some type of power that almost immediately forced the child to shift back into human form. His wounded arm now laid over the blanket as I focused my attention on it, the skin flayed and burned, blisters covering from his shoulder down to his fingers and all along the side of his body. There were more burns than other injuries, but the hook had done some particularly nasty damage—especially since it had been coated in an acidic poison.
My offer to heal the boy was how I ended up in the carriage with Kieran, Niz, and the boy, while the other three men followed in the second one. Truth be told, I was glad for the extra space, since it gave me room to spread out while focusing on using my power to stabilize his condition. My hand hovered inches over his blanket-covered form as I watched his body convulse in its unconscious state.
He had endured potentially fatal damage, truth be told.
It was clear that the Alfemir soldiers had been given weapons that would be effective in their mission to capture wyverns, piercing through their tough skin before pulling them toward imprisonment. But that didn’t explain why the hell it had been covered in poison.
More so, hadn’t Niz said that the metal used in the weapon that injured him was rare? Maybe it had been a normal weapon, but because the wyvern was a mere child, he had been more vulnerable to injury. Just one more question we needed an answer to.
I had no idea howIwas considered a monster when individuals willing to injure and poison an adolescent creature for their own means existed within the Alfemir guard.
Inhaling sharply, I put aside my anger and slowly focused on the push and pull of the blood through his veins—seeking out the poison with my power and extracting it. It was mostly on instinct but the minute I closed my eyes, I was able to visualize each particle of it, and while it was grueling and tiring work—I could feel that it was, in fact, working.
A red orb grew to encompass the injury from the hook before beginning to turn a sickly yellow-green shade from the pollution of the slow-acting but lethal agent.
“Why is it turning green?” Kieran asked crouched next to me on the carriage floor, her hand grasping the boy’s other hand.
“Poison,” Niz answered as I offered a sharp nod.
“Horrible,” she whispered, her hands tightening into white-knuckled fists in her lap. “Why?Whywould they poison him? To prove a point? To pull other wyverns out if he died? I thought the purpose was capture.”
“Maybe both options were viable in their minds,” I answered quietly before a cynical smirk tugged on my lips. “It isn’t like they’re particularly good at trial and error—the individuals I ’worked’ with enjoyed it when I feltanylevel of pain. Although, it was all disguised underthe umbrella of testing.”
“I hate them,” Kieran said vehemently, fiery anger flashing in her stunning eyes. “I hate them so much?—”
Reaching out, Niz put a hand on Kieran’s shoulder as if to calm her rage, but I didn’t want that. Rather, I wanted the opposite, her big feelings were somehow making me feel more grounded now.
“I just don’t understand how he got out,” Niz admitted quietly. “Wyverns leave occasionally, but he can’t be older than six.”
“There’s no way he would be let out alone,” Kieran speculated, brows pinching together as she glanced at Niz. “The guards would have stopped him, right?”
“If he went through the main doors, they absolutely should not have let him through,” Niz agreed with Kieran’s statement. “I have to assume he snuck out somehow. He’s young, school aged, so I wouldn’t put it past some prank gone wrong. There are tunnels throughout the cave systems, but he shouldn’t even know about those. We don’t tell the younglings about them until they’re fifteen or sixteen and go on their first flight in Alfemir. We use it as a way to assure them that there are other options to return home if they get lost—sono, there is no way this should have been allowed to happen.”
“When he wakes, we need to ask. I don’t want anyone else put in harm’s way,” Kieran whispered, her brows bent in distress as she looked toward the carriage door. “Talking about harm, do we need to worry about being able to enter the castle? We didn’t end on friendly terms with your parents, and I wouldn’t blame the soldiers for barring us from entry. I would bet that if it wasn’t for you Niz, people would assume we had injured the boy ourselves.”
“Any wyvern worth their salt would wait until an announcement from the king and queen before acting rashly,” Niz said after some thought, leaning forward so that his elbows rested on his knees. “At least I hope so. I know my parents will understand that the attack wasn’t our fault.”
Would they?I could hear him trying to sound confident in that statement, but I wasn’t sure I had as much trust for his parents. If they didn’t, I made a silent promise I would make it clear what happened and how the one problem—Alfemir—was now a true, direct threat to them.
“Either way, we’ll have this sorted soon. Thank you for keeping him stable, we’re nearly at the castle where the medicalstaff can take over. Castle staff will have been notified by the guard at our incoming approach, I have no doubt my parents will ensure the medical staff are there and waiting.”
“I may be done extracting the poison by the time we get there,” I told him, closing my eyes once more and focusing on working as carefully and efficiently as I could.
Despite working with a speed that impressed even me, I couldn’t help the images that continued to plague my brain—nightmares of my brother’s death. That same damned mountainous divide could have been another scene of slaughter, but it hadn’t been—all because of Kieran. She had saved this young boy.
“Proud of you, Darling.” My voice filled the carriage as I opened my eyes to look at Kieran. She stared back at me with a wide-eyed gaze, lips parted in surprise.
“What? Why?” she asked, almost baffled. I was running on instinct when it came to my relationship with Kieran, but I knew that we were very alike in some ways—and much like myself, I didn’t think many people had taken the time to tell her that they were proud of her.
“I’m proud of you,” I repeated. “You didn’t hesitate to act, and you saved him.”
And I couldn’t help but wonder, if she had been there when my brother died, could she have saved him as well? Of course, I would never know, but I liked to believe that she would have. Kieran had already soothed my demons, so it made sense to me that she would have been able to fix that as well.
“Bash—” Her voice was imbued with a softness that had me holding her gaze. It felt like there were a million things she wanted to say, but as the carriage touched down, I was aware that we had an audience right outside our door so I shook my head and she snapped her mouth closed.
